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Summary of the impact

For about a decade, Professor Nick Bostrom and others have been pursuing
research on what he
calls `existential risk': this research deals with basic threats both to
the quality of our future life and
indeed to our having any future life at all. This work has had
considerable impact on policy.
Professor Bostrom has been invited to play a large number of advisory and
consultation roles, to
government departments and major insurance companies among many others.
His work has also
attracted a huge amount of attention among the wider public. He has been
invited to give
prestigious public lectures, and he has given many interviews on his ideas
to the media - thereby
contributing to the public awareness of the huge risks at stake.

Underpinning research

Professor Nick Bostrom and others have been pursuing research on what he
calls `existential risk'
for about a decade. The period since 2006, when he became Director of the
Future Of Humanity
Institute in the Oxford Martin School, has seen significant developments
in this research. Indeed,
one of the founding aims of the Institute was precisely to bring
interdisciplinary expertise to bear on
the research in an attempt to tackle questions of crucial importance to
humanity that had previously
received remarkably little attention within academia.

Professor Bostrom defines an `existential risk' as a certain sort of
global catastrophic risk: one that
threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life
or the permanent and drastic
destruction of its potential for desirable future development. His
research includes investigation
both of potential causes of such risks and of biases and other flaws in
how we think about them.

In the 2005 article `How Unlikely is a Doomsday Catastrophe?', which
Professor Bostrom co-authored
with Max Tegmark, the authors consider such extreme existential risks as a
breakdown of
a metastable vacuum state triggered by a microscopic black hole. They
argue that many previous
bounds on the frequency of such events give a false sense of security due
to a failure to take into
account the fact that observers are by definition in places lucky enough
to have avoided
destruction: the authors derive their own new upper bound. In his 2011
article `Information
Hazards' Professor Bostrom explores a quite different type of risk. By an
`information hazard' he
means a risk that arises from the dissemination or the potential
dissemination of information that
may directly or indirectly cause harm. He argues that such hazards are
often much more subtle
than physical threats, and that it is therefore easy for us to overlook
them, though they can be just
as serious as physical threats. In `Anthropic Shadow', Professor Bostrom
joins forces with Dr Milan
Ćirković and Dr Anders Sandberg to explore limitations on our ability to
assess risks. In particular,
they focus on an observation selection effect—what they call the
`anthropic shadow'—that prevents
us from observing certain sorts of catastrophes in our recent geological
and evolutionary past. The
significance of this is that it creates a kind of second-order risk,
namely the risk of our significantly
underestimating the risk of any type of catastrophe that lies within the
shadow.

In his 2009 article `The Future of Humanity', Professor Bostrom explains
more generally the
importance of our considering the risks that attend our own future. He
first raises some very broad
issues about the nature of predictability, drawing attention to ways in
which the long-term future
can be easier to predict than the short-term future, then looks in
particular at the question of
whether our long-term future can be expected to be `post-human', in the
sense, roughly, that it can
be expected to involve changes of degree in us profound enough to
constitute changes of kind. He
considers ways in which the assumptions that we make about these matters
shape the decisions
that we make, both in our personal lives and in public policy, and he
highlights the very unfortunate
consequences that sometimes accrue.

Professor Bostrom and Dr Milan Ćirković are also joint editors of the
2008 collection Global
Catastrophic Risks, to which they contribute an introduction. This
collection explores a wide range
of existential risks currently facing us, including those associated with
natural catastrophes, nuclear
war, the use of biological weapons, terrorism, global warming, advanced
nanotechnology, artificial
intelligence, and social collapse.

Professor Bostrom has been Director of the Future of Humanity Institute
and of the Programme on
the Impacts of Future Technology since their inception as part of the
Oxford Martin School in 2005,
having for the two previous years been a postdoctoral research fellow in
the Faculty of Philosophy.
Milan Ćirković has been a Research Associate at the Future of Humanity
Institute since 2008.
Anders Sandberg has been a James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of
Humanities Institute
and the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology since 2005.

References to the research

Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom, `Astrophysics: How Unlikely is a Doomsday
Catastrophe?' in
Nature238 (2005), 754. (An expanded version of this
article appears on Professor
Bostrom's personal website: http://www.nickbostrom.com.)
doi:10.1038/438754a

The quality of this research is evidenced in each case by the place of
publication. The peer-reviewed
journals and publishing houses concerned do not publish work that is not
of
internationally recognized quality. The third article listed, `Anthropic
Shadow', won the award for
the best paper of the year by the journal editors.

Details of the impact

Professor Bostrom's work has led to his being invited to play a large
number of advisory and
consultation roles, to government departments, major insurance companies,
and other institutions,
and this in turn has led to his work's having a large impact on policy. In
2009, he advised Booz
Allen, a strategy and technology consulting firm. That same year, he
advised a joint meeting of the
Royal Society and the International Council of Life Sciences on biomedical
risk: the Royal Society
published a report from that meeting which was subsequently circulated to
the Presidential
Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. In the transcript of the
meeting of the Commission
at which the report was circulated, and during which Professor Bostrom was
several times cited,
the concluding summary states that `[this] was a day... for the Commission
that was rich in input...
[We] heard a lot... about value and values... [including] the value of
understanding risk... [to] many
things that we have been deliberating as a Commission.'[i]
Professor Bostrom served as an expert
member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Catastrophic
Risks from 2010
to 2011, and the council went on to produce a series of proposals,
including the proposal that a
`transnational... mechanism that can identify and work to prevent,
anticipate and prepare for
catastrophic risks' be established.[ii] In 2010, he
advised: the US State Department's Global
Futures Forum; Amlin Insurance (the Aggregate Modelling Division); BAE
Systems (the Global
Combat Systems, Land and Armaments Divisions); and the Science for
Humanity `Global Risk
Register', which uses expert advice in an attempt to achieve an
appropriate management of risks
and controls, and which Baroness Susan Greenfield, Trustee of Science for
Humanity, describes
as destined to have 'a positive impact on the economy as well as humanity'[iii].
In 2011, he advised
the MacArthur Foundation. And that same year he advised Digital Sky
Technologies concerning
talking points for a roundtable discussion between its Chief Executive
Officer, Yuri Milner, and the
leaders of the G8 countries for the 37th Annual G8 Leaders
Summit in Deauville. The advice that
he gave Amlin Insurance impressed them to such an extent that they
subsequently contributed
£900,000 towards funding a collaborative research project between them and
the Future of
Humanity Institute to investigate systemic risk.

Professor Bostrom has marshalled his ideas to give practical advice in
several other ways. He is
on the Advisory Board of the Singularity Institute, which aims to bring
rational analysis and rational
strategy to the challenges facing humanity and which holds an annual
summit to coordinate and
educate those concerned with these challenges.[iv] He
co-founded the Institute for Ethics and
Emerging Technology, whose mission is to be a centre for voices arguing
for a responsible
approach to the most powerful emerging technologies.[v]
He also founded the Existential Risk
Reduction Career Network, a community whose members discuss the strengths
and weaknesses
of different careers in terms of existential risk, share advice on job
applications and career
advancement, help one another to find interviews, and suchlike.

In July 2008, Professor Bostrom organised a conference entitled `Global
Catastrophic Risks',
concerned with the various ideas that were eventually published in that
same year in the collection
of the same name.[vi] Several of the conference's
participants had significant non-academic
profiles. They included: Joseph Cirincione, President of the Ploughshare
Fund, a foundation
dedicated to the reduction of nuclear proliferation; Chris Phoenix and
Mike Tredor, co-founders of
the Centre for Responsible Nanotechnology, an organisation whose mission
is to raise awareness
of, and to expedite the thorough examination of, the benefits and dangers
of advanced
nanotechnology, and to assist in the creation and implementation of the
responsible use of such
technology; and Sir Crispin Tickell, Director of the Policy Foresight
Programme at the James
Martin School. There was extensive coverage of this conference in New
Scientist, Reason Online,
The Scotsman, Earth and Sky, and CNN.

A significant additional part of the impact of Professor Bostrom's
research derives from the way in
which he has drawn the issues of existential risk to people's attention.
(For instance, his work has
inspired the setting up of an existential risk research centre in
Cambridge, for which he serves as
an external advisor.) He has disseminated his ideas widely through the
media in a way that has
attracted considerable public debate. Among the highly distinguished
public lectures and other
public presentations that he has given on these issues since 2008 are the
following:

a keynote address to the Global Catastrophic Risks Conference in 2008;

the opening presentation at the Policy Foresight Programme Workshop in
2008;

a discussion with Sir Martin Rees at the Science Foo Camp, organised
by Nature, Google,
and O'Reilly Media in 2008;

the opening keynote address to the Guardian Activate Summit in 2009;

a talk to the Chancellor's Court of Benefactors in 2009;

a talk to the Future Scenarios Seminar run jointly by the
International Centre for Community
Development, the European Centre for Jewish Leadership, and the American
Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee in 2010;

a panel contribution to the Leaders of Change Summit in the Istanbul
World Political Forum
in 2011;

a keynote address at a Global Futures Forum workshop on
transformational technologies,
partly under the auspices of the US Department of State and the Italian
Intelligence
Community, in 2012.

Since 2008, Professor Bostrom has also been interviewed on the issues of
existential risk by
(among others) the Discovery Channel for Canadian television, New
Scientist, The Scotsman,
Epoca (the premier Brazilian news weekly), Kultur Zeit for German
television, Time, Die Zeit, the
History Channel and Bloomberg News for American television, Time
Magazine, Bayerischer
Rundfunk for German radio, ABC, i (a Portuguese newspaper), World
Affairs Monthly, Il Sole 24
Ore (an Italian monthly magazine), Utbildningsradion (a Swedish
Educational Broadcasting
Company), The Times Online Magazine, The Guardian, Science
& Vie, Scientific American[vii],
Bloomsberg Buisnessweek,[viii]The Economist,
the BBC (television and radio), Aeon (a digital
magazine with an online blog which in this case attracted very many
enthusiastic comments) and
Huffpost Line[x] (an online journal that reaches 27
million monthly viewers) as well as in the
documentary film Transhuman by Titus Nachbauer[xi].
An interview for The Atlantic,[xii] despite
being over 5,000 words long, received over half a million reads, was
shared over 6,000 times in
social media (Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter) and made the front
cover of Reddit. An
interview for Aeon[xiii] was shared nearly 4,500
times in social media. An article on the BBC News
website in April 2013,[xiv] following on from interviews
for Radios 4 and 5, was the most read story
of the day, with 1.2 million readers for that day, and, was shared over
13,000 times in social
media.[1]

[iii] The page of the website of the Global Risk Register, on
which there is a video link to Professor
Bostrom's discussion of catastrophic risk and from which the quotation
from Baroness Susan
Greenfield is taken is: https://www.globalriskregister.org/grr-news-press.html